By JANE ZHANG
The federal government is stepping up efforts to improve the quality of nursing-home care and now has an online tool consumers can use in evaluating facilities.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, will start running a pilot program this summer to see if cash incentives to nursing homes can improve the care they provide, especially in areas such as nurse staffing and preventable hospitalizations.
Separately, in December, the agency started ranking facilities based on government inspection results, staffing data and quality measures. This "Nursing Home Compare" system, which gives one to five stars to 16,000 nursing homes, is available at medicare.gov/NHCompare.
The agency also flags some of the most troubled nursing homes -- now about 135 -- on the Web site.....
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